Quote

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

Bernard Malamud

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Bernard Malamud
Age: 71 †
Born: 1914
Born: April 26
Died: 1986
Died: March 18
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Pure
Biography
Fiction
Mud
Past
Legend
Make
Biographies
Time
Clay
Life
Legends
Wholly
Exudes
Ultimately
Recaptured

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
Bernard Malamud
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.
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The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.
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Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud
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The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
Bernard Malamud
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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
Bernard Malamud
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Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.
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Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
Bernard Malamud
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When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
Bernard Malamud
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I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
Bernard Malamud
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As long as a man stays alive he can't tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
Bernard Malamud
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There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.
Bernard Malamud
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One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
Bernard Malamud
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... it's possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.
Bernard Malamud
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
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It's one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned it's another not to be able to live by what one does know.
Bernard Malamud
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You see in others who you are.
Bernard Malamud
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
Bernard Malamud